Cooler Comparison Testing

Cooler Testing Methods

To best gage the quality of the system coolers under review, system CPU temperature and cooling system audio measurements were taken with the CPU idle and under load. To replicate CPU idle conditions, the system was rebooted and allowed to sit idle for 10 minutes. To replicate a stress system load, Aida64 System Stability Test was used in conjunction with EVGA OC Scanner X for 30 minutes per run. After each run, the system was shut down and allowed to rest for 10 minutes to cool down. Then the CPU cooler was removed, cleaned, and remounted to the CPU with fresh thermal paste applied. This procedure was repeated a total of 6 times for each cooler – three times each for the stock and overclocking speed runs on the X99-based systems.

Temperature measurements were taken directly from the CPU thermistors using CoreTemp v1.0 RC7 for the X99 testing. Because of the volatile nature of the Haswell-E thermistor readings, the system temperatures were measured as follows. For idle temperatures, the highest recorded value was used for the run. For load temperatures, a series of three values were notated: the average (high and low) across all cores, the average (high and low) across the single highest core, and the high temperature.

Note that the temperature values are reported as deltas rather than absolute temperatures with the delta value reported calculated as CPU temperature – ambient temperature. For all tests, room ambient temperature was maintained between 23-27C.

Intel X99-based Haswell-E System Testing

CPU Stock Speed Testing

The CPU stock speed testing was conducted with the BIOS defaults set for the CPU and Turbo Mode disabled, equating to a 3.0GHz CPU speed, 2133MHz memory speed, 3.0GHz ring bus speed, and 100MHz base clock. The Intel Speedstep functionality remained enabled for the duration of the testing to get realistic CPU idle performance conditions.

At stock speeds with the Haswell-E processor, the Koolance CPU-360 block performed best overall with all of the other tested blocks remaining within a few degrees of its performance.

CPU Overclocked Speed Testing

The CPU overclocked speed testing was conducted with known stable settings from a previous board review with Turbo Mode disabled, equating to a 4.50GHz CPU speed, 2666MHz memory speed, 3.5GHz ring bus speed, and 125MHz base clock. The Intel Speedstep functionality remained enabled for the duration of the testing to get realistic CPU idle performance conditions.

Board voltage settings were configured as follows:

  • CPU Core Voltage – 1.35
  • DRAM Voltage – 1.23
  • All other settings set to Auto or stock setting3s

The performance of the blocks under comparison was much more telling with the processor overclocked. Both Koolance blocks were the top performers with the Koolance CPU-360 block maintaining the performance lead. The XSPC Raystorm block settled for middle of the pack performance with both Swiftech blocks falling behind the Koolance blocks by 10 degrees or more in some cases.

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